The present invention relates to meta models and more specifically to a framework to populate and maintain a service oriented architecture (SOA) industry model repository (IMR).
Service oriented architecture (SOA) is an enterprise scale information technology (IT) architecture for linking resources on demand. In SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value-net, enterprise, and/or line of business, typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises, where the primary structuring element for applications are a service, as opposed to subsystems, systems, or components. The service consists of a set of business aligned service definitions that collectively fulfill an organization's business processes and goals. These services can be choreographed into composite applications and can be invoked through internet based open protocols.
Industry standard models are usually very big and complex by their nature. Their sheer volume makes them hard to manage on a project implementation level. In order to populate the gigantic industry models, they need to broken up and parsed systematically and automatically.
Manually populating the repository, especially for the entire vertical industries, would be exhaustive, redundant and error prone. There is existing domain knowledge that can be leveraged, e.g. Multi-Model Mapper (MMM) for Insurance Application Architecture (IAA). MMM has already created mappings among various models, i.e. the mappings for processes, interfaces and data models.
A service or utility that collects key concepts, complex industry standard models, resources, assets, etc. in the enterprises' information from the SOA IMR and ties it all together does not, exist making knowledge transfer and reuse of resources and assets difficult. Therefore, there is a need for tools that automate the process of encoding arbitrarily complex knowledge structures and link them to information assets.